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Introducing Web Content Management
by Robert Kraai 08/12/2011
I can remember back around 1995/96 working as a Database Administrator and tools developer when I saw the Web for the first time. I was using a service at home (DELPHI) to connect to the text Internet that didn't support HTTP. Local ISPs were new to the scene, if you can believe it. I had to search for an ISP that would give me access to use a "browser". What I found was that the available pages were crude and visually unappealing by today's standards, but I saw it as eventually opening up a much broader audience to connect than services of the day like CompuServe and AOL. It was free, and you could create anything. It seemed that within the next couple of years that every company (and most computer geeks) wanted their own web page. Savvy folks were building back end systems to drive their ""web page".
People who saw the potential for the web wanted something to make it easy to manage how their pages looked and what appeared on them without digging into markup languages or scripting. They wanted to manage their own web content. Tools for making web templates came on the scene fairly quickly. Tools for making the content that went into these templates started as simple database applications, and eventually came together to form the first commercial web content management system frameworks. These competed and evolved into what we think of as Web Content Management today.
Web Content is any article, image, video, document, social media, or any piece of information or file that a person or company wants pushed out to the web. Web Content Management (WCM) enables the creation, modification, publication, un-publication, archiving, and deletion of content used on an Intranet or Internet site. It also has evolved to encompass the framework for creating the templates that display the content and to provide web functionality (like social media).
In fact, as any web technology becomes more important to the business user, the WCM systems begin to incorporate that technology to enable its application (enablement by the general user without hours of technical training). That is the real key to a WCM: Enable the use of web technology without having to know how it all works behind the scenes. Thus, a WCM is not just about Content anymore, but Content plus the Web features that interact with it and with the users.
The WCM system is the software that bridges the gap between the ideas behind a site and the technology needed to make the ideas real.